


verbena

by lizzieraindrops



Series: A midnight study in purple [4]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, Self-Harm, helsinki, reference to Helsinki #3 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 20:07:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6023044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizzieraindrops/pseuds/lizzieraindrops
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not long after the events of Helsinki, Veera meets Helena for the very first time. A oneshot originally posted for a prompt <a href="http://lizzieraindrops.tumblr.com/post/139344787629/verbena-veera-and-helena">on tumblr</a>. Possibly set soon after the <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/6022735">holly</a> ficlet.</p><p>
  <i>Verbena: pray for me</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	verbena

She’s skirting the sidewalk of a too-broad, crisply cobbled street on the outskirts of Copenhagen when she glimpses her. A too-familiar face ducking into an alleyway, hastened by a swish of blond hair that vanishes into the long afternoon shadows like ice into water. Veera’s insides immediately knot into a tangle of twisted iron as her rapid pace screeches to a halt.

 _It’s not Niki_ , she tells herself harshly. _Niki is dead_.

_But what if she escaped, too, somehow?_

_She didn’t. I_ know  _that. And that girl’s hair was curly…_ Though surely Niki knew how to curl her hair. It’s the sort of thing she’s certain Niki would know.

Half of her wants to bolt straight back in the direction she’d come, before another set of those omnipresent eyes see the two of them together and drop her like a prize deer. Surely everyone who knows what she looks like has orders to kill her on sight. It’s easy when your prey has a target plastered right across its face.

The other half, the girl-part of her that she always fed fairytales and tricked into believing in miracles, is keening.

She darts forward anyway.

She whirls around the corner where she vanished so quickly that the bulk of her backpack strains at her shoulders and nearly swings her off-balance. She’s pelting down the alley in an unwise cacophony desperate footsteps echoing off stone.

The figure faintly silhouetted at the other end of the alley twitches with awareness the instant she enters it. It twists to meet her with planted feet and slightly raised arms, as if at any moment they might turn to wings, or claws.

Veera skids to a stop not two meters from her, and a sudden stillness seizes them as they eye each other like two uneasy creatures in a dark wood.

It’s a girl as small as she, skinny legs sticking out from under her oversized coat like a bird’s. Her heavy eyes widen as she registers Veera’s face. Niki’s eyes never looked that haunted, and Niki never moved with that kind of animal alacrity.

 _You’re not her_ , Veera thinks to herself, and hears the words slip out into the closeness of the alley as a whisper. Her heart sinks and her leaden insides turn back into aching flesh.

“And you are not the sheep I expected, coming so easily into the fold,” the girl replies in heavily accented Finnish. Is she Russian? Ukrainian? The girl stares at her with cautious curiosity; takes one large step forward. Veera holds her ground. The reflected light from the street makes those starkly blonde curls flicker like ghosts in the small breezes that trouble the alleyway. “Who am I not?”

“No one,” Veera says with quiet bitterness. “She’s dead.”

She takes another slow step toward Veera, and suddenly she’s too close. “ _Good_ ,” she croons, and her left hand is reaching out toward Veera, and she finally realizes that there’s something in the girl’s right hand, and that something is a knife - 

\- a German voice heard over the phone -

_\- Her mother - screaming for her. It’s Ania. I heard - she was… stabbed in the throat. Right in her room -_

Veera leaps backward in a blast of adrenaline, but the girl’s left hand is knotted in the fabric of her hood, and she’s lunged forward with her in a single fluid motion. The suddenness of it shakes that huge coat askew and leaves the shoulder of her knife arm gleaming pale and exposed. Once again, the two of them freeze into silent immobility. Veera’s hood has fallen off, and the pull of the faint breeze on her short hair is incredibly distracting. But she forcibly ignores it, because the weight of those eyes is bearing down on her like the knife that’s held inches away from her neck.

If she moves suddenly, she will die. She is sure of this. Veera’s legs are trembling with the effort of holding still, aching to  _run_. 

The intensity of the girl’s gaze catches and holds her eyes. They are still wide with alert curiosity, not narrowed with maliciousness. There are dark circles beneath them. “What happened to you, little lamb?” she says softly. Very slowly, as if to not disturb the precarious balance of their taut stillness, the hand anchoring her uncurls from its fist and lifts slowly toward her cheek.

 _Oh my god, she’s going to touch my scar. No, no, no, no_. But Veera can’t move. She will die.

The ghostly touch of cool fingertips tracing the roughness of the skin on her cheek sends unpleasant chills spangling all down Veera’s neck and back. It’s too much, and her  _stare_  is too much. Veera twitches but redoubles her effort to clamp herself into stillness. Her eyes leap away from the girl’s, to her bony too-close wrist, to her wood-handled knife, to her exposed shoulder. There are marks trailing up across the top of her shoulder from the back; thin cuts. Fresh scars.

As slowly as the girl herself had, Veera lifts a trembling hand to touch the scars on her shoulder.

The girl twitches, too, and her eyes when Veera looks back to them are even wider with shock, and veiled with uncertainty.

They stand there for a few breathless moments in something both less and more than an embrace. The feather-like tracery under Veera’s fingers is raised, and sharp with recently dried blood. Their same flesh shudders delicately with the same deep discomfort as they pass a tremor back and forth.

Suddenly, they break apart. Veera takes a ragged breath; backs up a few more steps. Her eyes still locked with the girl’s, she tugs her hood back up in a vain attempt to quell the tremor still running through her. The girl stares back aghast as if  _Veera_  has wounded  _her_ , knife hanging slack and forgotten at her side.

Veera backs away another step.  _Walk, don’t run. It attracts attention_. She takes another, and another, until she’s back at the mouth of the alley. The last of the afternoon light spreads warmth over her back. She can still see the girl in the shadows, pulling that big green coat protectively over her shoulders again. She looks even smaller now.

Veera waits, and stares, until the girl looks down and turns away toward her own end of the alley.

 _Time to leave,_  she thinks to herself.  _This city isn’t safe_.

Although Veera plays the encounter over and over again in her head for the rest of the day, she can’t make any sense of the wordless thing that had passed between them. As she lays awake in her tiny, uncomfortable bed on the ferry to Norway that night, her exhausted mind is full of feathers and dry blood and winged creatures and ghostly touches.

 _I hope she’s okay_ , Veera thinks, surprising herself with the thought.

Eventually, she falls into a restless sleep troubled by vague dreams. When she wakes, her body is aching with the previous day’s stress. She sits up in her bed, pulls her knees into her chest, and holds her face in her hands. Her shoulders ache the worst.


End file.
